During the Civil War, the United States Treasury served as the Union’s financial command center, where between 1861 and 1865 Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase raised $2.7 billion to finance the government and the war by issuing bonds, instituting internal revenue taxes, printing paper money called greenbacks, and creating the first personal income tax in the United States. He also revived the nation’s early but short-lived system of national banks to provide financial stability, a network that remained in place until the Federal Reserve System was established in 1913. The first section of the Treasury was designed by Robert Mills in 1836. Wartime activity filled the building: the 5th Massachusetts camped there and cooked in the courtyard, the basement became a bunker for the president and his cabinet in case of Confederate attack, and the short-handed federal government hired large numbers of women for the first time as lady clerks to hand-trim huge sheets of greenbacks. In 1863, the Treasury also hosted an experiment devised by President Lincoln in which loyal slave owners in the District of Columbia were paid to free their property, though the idea was not extended to other slaveholding communities.
